The i850 was the only Pentium 4 chipset available for the first six months of the Pentium 4's availability. Coupled with the high relative price of RDRAM and the dual-channel memory controller's requirement for paired RIMMs, this caused significant problems for the adoption of the Pentium 4. In fact, for a relatively long time, all retail Pentium 4 processors came bundled with 128 MB of RDRAM in two 64 MB RIMMs. By the time the i845-DDDR SDRAM chipset came out, the price of RDRAM was not greatly larger than that of DDR, although this was due almost as much to rising DDR prices as it was to falling RDRAM prices.

The i850 was a very fast chipset on release, and it remained the fastest Pentium 4 chipset for over a year, until DDR333 chipsets from VIA and SiS as well as Intel's own i850E and i845E were released. The dual-channel RDRAM controller provided enough memory bandwidth to saturate the 100 MHz quad-pumpedFSB of the Pentium 4. The primary disadvantage to the i850 chipset throughout this time was cost; mainboards based on the 850 were significantly more expensive than those based on other chipsets. The i850 was finally retired in May 2002, replaced by the i850E with support for the 133 MHz quad-pumped processor bus.

(CC)This writeup is copyright 2002D.G. Roberge and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial licence. Details can be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/2.0/ .